PAUL MORTON
PAUL MORTON, secretary of the United States navy, brought to that position the efficiency and resourcefulness which are often developed in so high a degree in the great educational training-school of the railway systems of our country. His early interest as a boy, he says, centered "in transportation," and after a short period of schooling, in his sixteenth year he went directly into the land office of the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad, at Burlington, Iowa, at a salary of sixteen dollars a month. He is a conspicuous example of the continuous mental growth which steady application to the problems of transportation, both in the passenger and freight departments, and to all the related business of the great highway's of commerce and travel, develops in a man endowed with good natural capacity. The dispatch and accuracy, the foresight and the unremitting attention, which railroad work demands in all its branches is a constant stimulus to the brain and the will. The harmonious management of the work as a whole, calls for an insight on the part of leading minds which is akin to genius. Our railroads have developed many men of fine powers. Like a highly graded school or college they train men for advanced work by the thorough mastery of the work in hand, and they constantly make way for those who are capable of going higher, giving enterprising men broader scope in their official work as they prove themselves capable of larger tasks.
Mr.Morton's career has been one of steady advancement.
He has always taken advanced views in regard to the relation and the duties of the railroads to the public. He has advocated reasonable rates and has been opposed to preferential rates. And he urged in railroad conferences and elsewhere that, first of all, the freight rates of the country should be adjusted on a basis which all competent railroad men could maintain—without discrimination between individuals. He is a believer in coōperation, and holds that the laws of trade are inexorable, and like the laws of nature will in time prevail over attempted regulations which are contrary to the
